Disclosed herein is a method for predicting blade life in an image production device, as well as corresponding apparatus and computer-readable medium.
In electrostatographic printing with dry marking material generally referred to as xerography), an electrostatic latent image is created on a charge-retentive surface, such as an image receptor, photoreceptor or other charge receptor, and the latent image is developed by exposing it to a supply of toner particles, which are attracted as needed to appropriately-charged areas of the latent image. The toner particles are then transferred in image-wise fashion from the image receptor to a print sheet, the print sheet being subsequently heated to permanently fuse the toner particles thereto to form a durable image.
Following the transfer of the image from the image receptor to the print sheet, residual toner particles remaining on the image receptor are removed or cleaned by any number of known means, such as including a cleaning blade, brush, and/or vacuum. In a typical embodiment, the removed residual toner is then collected directly into a hopper, from where it is then removed, typically for example by means of an auger, into a waste container.
The life of a cleaning blade (or “blade life”) has traditionally been determined from a failure distribution generated by collecting life data from numerous blades run under actual field or field representative conditions. When sufficient data has been collected to have confidence in the failure distribution, blade life is determined by selecting an acceptable failure percentage for the distribution. If failure of 10% of the blade population is acceptable, the end of use point for each blade in the population is found from the cumulative probability of failure distribution where 90% of the blades survive.
The problem with such a method for determining the end of blade life point is that different stress levels influence how long an individual blade will survive. If stress information is available for individual blades then life predictions for individual blade blades can be made. If blades are replaced based on actual usage stress, then the blade life distribution for the entire population will shift to longer lives and fewer failures. More of the lightly stressed blades will be run closer to their individual failure points and more of the highly stressed blades will be replaced before they fail.